Hi Daniel, 2009/4/30 Daniel Carrera <daniel.carr...@theingots.org>: > > 1) First, a broad question: Why do you like wxHaskell?
Well, the wxHaskell list may not be the place to get objective advice, but... The main reason I got started with wxHaskell was that I needed to put together a GUI application for Windows, and I wanted to use Haskell to do it. At the time (it's much better now) Gtk+ was a pig to get working on Windows, and didn't have anything like a native look and feel. Mac was also 'nice to have' for me, and again, Gtk+ at the time worked only on the Mac X server. The company I work for has major issues with LGPL (we're flat out forbidden to use anything LGPL, although GPL is OK in certain circumstances), whereas wxWidgets (and hence wxHaskell) has a license that unambiguously allows for closed source development. I like that it is stable, has pretty much all of the features I need in a GUI, is easy to distribute (i.e. roll up into an installer) and looks good on all three major platforms. > 2) I've heard that wxWidgets doesn't work that well on Mac OS X, but > looking at the screen shots, it looks very native to me. How is OS X > support? To get a *really* native OS X look and feel, you will need to do a few platform specific pieces of code, but it looks pretty good out of the box with just a recompile. It's not perfect (no cross-platform toolkit really can be), and there are a few more bugs on Mac than other platforms, but it is closer (out of the box) to OS X native look and feel than either of Gtk+ or Qt IMHO. Having said that, I think you can achieve excellent results with all of the toolkits, and if you want to go further, you'd better use HOC, which allows access to OS X native tools such as InterfaceBuilder - although the project does not appear to be very active these days. > The last couple of days I have been trying to learn about cross-platform > GUIs with Haskell. In general I like Gtk+, WX and Qt, I think they are > all great. But it looks like qtHaskell is too new, and Gtk doesn't > support Mac well at all. But on the other hand, a lot of Haskell people > seem to like Gtk2Hs. I've never used or seriously looked at QtHaskell, so I'm not very qualified to judge. The only comment I would make (after 15 minutes browsing the documentation) is that it looks as though the bindings are a fairly low level wrapper around the Qt libraries just now. I would expect the library itself to be pretty stable, as once you get the wrapper generating code correct, most things just work. There's little to choose, technically, between Gtk2Hs and wxHaskell, I think, and any choice you make is more likely to be about the platforms you care about most than about functionality or stability. For me, platform importance is Windows, Mac, Linux (in descending priority) and I think wxHaskell is a slightly better fit to my needs. I suspect that many in the community use mainly or only Linux, in which case Gtk2Hs is probably a better fit. Pragmatically, both Gtk2Hs and wxHaskell have pretty much everything most people would need, and more besides. There are probably more active developers of Gtk2Hs, but both projects are actively and enthusiastically maintained. Both also offer some higher level syntactic sugar over the bindings to make programming a bit easier, although in both cases it all feels a bit 'imperative' - you do all of the GUI stuff inside a 'do', and the code is pretty reminiscent of what you'd write in C++. Hope this helps, and more importantly, I hope you decide to write a GUI application in Haskell. Regards Jeremy O'Donoghue ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Register Now & Save for Velocity, the Web Performance & Operations Conference from O'Reilly Media. Velocity features a full day of expert-led, hands-on workshops and two days of sessions from industry leaders in dedicated Performance & Operations tracks. Use code vel09scf and Save an extra 15% before 5/3. http://p.sf.net/sfu/velocityconf _______________________________________________ wxhaskell-users mailing list wxhaskell-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wxhaskell-users
